Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  I'm sitting in the VIP suite in Solitary. Some porno king just vacated it. I'm in a long line of celebrities to get this cell. I don't know what to make out of this insanity. Tomorrow at 4 A.M. I'll get awakened—I'm going to Texarkana jail, by bus. I was lucky, they said. Usually you have to wait at least a week for the Texarkana bus. The inmates say it takes up to 3 months to cross the country unless you're 'top priority celebrity' status. Can you dig it? A celebrity because I got railroaded by a N.C. judge & jury for something I didn't do 9.5 years ago.

  The next day, Judge Dupree reaffirmed his denial of bail, stating, "While it is true that this defendant is a well established professional man and has never heretofore failed to meet all court appearances, the situation with which he is now confronted is far different from that which has heretofore obtained. As a highly skilled physician, the defendant presumably would have no difficulty in finding employment in any one of the many countries of the wqrld which do not have extradition treaties with the United States, and the temptation to seek refuge in another country would certainly be great indeed."

  Not yet informed of Dupree's decision regarding bail, MacDonald wrote to me from Texarkana:

  I'm going nuts waiting to hear about bail. No news in Atlanta and now nothing here for 2 days. You'd think that lawyers that spent $200,000 losing a case could spend $5 on a telegram to Texarkana with some news. IF I ever get out of jail, I hope to Fuck One of them gets shot or in a car accident & comes to my emergency room. We'll discuss fees first, then I'll disappear for a while and let them watch a clock on the wall for a while. Then I'll slowly institute treatment, stopping every now & then to wait for more money. Gradually, they'll realize that this could take years. Every time they get uptight, I'll give them the option offered me: continued flow of money for unknown treatments that are not necessary, or I can sign off the case and they are free to find another Dr. I'd love it.

  MacDonald remained in Texarkana for another ten days. Then he was bused to El Reno, Oklahoma, and then to El Paso, Texas, from where he was finally flown to the Long Beach airport, arriving on September 27, in chains. He wrote to me two days later from Terminal Island, terming it "reasonable—decent food, exercise, no harassment from guards & only subliminal violence. It's still prison. But bearable."

  He then wrote: "It is very strange to sit on my bunk in prison (for Christ's sake!) and see Long Beach harbor. The ships, the sailboats, the breakwater—downtown Long Beach and the seagulls and pelicans. I see it all through (a) bars, (b) wire fence, (c) barbed wire with razor-type barbs. I am so near to my home, my friends, my work, but in truth light years away. . . ."

  He continued: "I'm trying to get over some mild anterior shin splints from running on concrete in prison sneakers. My clothing box has arrived from home & I now have my Etonics. I'm also lifting weights. ..."

  He then mentioned—saying he would supply more detail later— "Notoriety upon arrival. Press attempts to see me. Everyone aware of my arrival." And continued:

  Support continues to pour in & has really been phenomenal. I still am getting letters from N.C. citizens who apparently were/are outraged by the judge & jury's actions. People here in Long Beach have been just super. The job is still mine at the hospital. The staff is behind me, and hundreds of people from all over are offering money, time, letters, etc. etc. It makes me feel good. . . .

  On October 5, 1979, Bernie Segal asked the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond to overrule Judge Dupree's denial of bail.

  On October 12—MacDonald's thirty-sixth birthday—friends and former colleagues from St. Mary's rented an airplane to fly over the prison, trailing a sign that said, HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROCK— "Rock" being the nickname he had acquired in the emergency room in tribute to his coolness and steadiness under pressure.

  Oral argument on his motion for bail took place before a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit court on November 6. Ten days later, the appeals court upheld Judge Dupree's denial. The following week I flew to California.

  2

  "In all the orthodox psychoses," Hervey Cleckley has written in The Mask of Sanity, "there is a more or less obvious alteration of reasoning process or of some other demonstrable personality feature. In the psychopath, this is not seen. The observer is confronted with a convincing mask of sanity. All the outward features of this mask are intact; it cannot be displaced or penetrated. . . . Examination reveals not merely an ordinary two-dimensional mask but what seems to be a solid and substantial structural image of the sane and rational personality. . . . The observer finds verbal and facial expressions, tones of voice, and all the other signs we have come to regard as implying conviction and emotion and the normal experiencing of life as we know it ourselves and as we assume it to be in others. ...

  "Only very slowly and by a complex estimation or judgment based on multitudinous small impressions does the conviction come upon us that, despite these intact rational processes, these normal emotional affirmations, and their consistent application in all directions, we are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly.

  "So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real. And yet we eventually come to know or feel we know that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here."

  * * *

  I rented a car at the Los Angeles airport and drove to Long Beach.

  On that hot and cloudless Saturday morning in June, when I had driven down this same San Diego Freeway en route to my first meeting with Jeffrey MacDonald, I had been listening to an FM music station. Just as I had finally found his condominium and had located a parking space, a song ended. It was a song I had never heard before. The disc jockey, a woman, said, "I don't know why I decided to play that. It hadn't been programmed. Something just came over me and made me do it." As I was turning off the ignition, she gave the name of the song. It was "Psycho Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est?" Those were the last words I had heard before meeting Jeffrey MacDonald for the first time. All summer long I had been telling myself it was only a coincidence, nothing more.

  Now, in November, heading toward Long Beach on another warm and sunny afternoon, I turned on the radio. The first song I heard was from the new Eagles album, which had just been released. The song was called "Heartache Tonight," and it began:

  Somebody's gonna hurt someone Before the night is through. Somebody's gonna come undone, There's nothin' we can do . . .

  I drove to St. Mary's Hospital and parked the car. I went inside and saw Jeffrey MacDonald's secretary. She gave me the keys to his condominium. She said he was holding up well. I would be living in the condominium during my stay. It was conveniently situated—less than half an hour's drive from Terminal Island—and it would provide me with easy access to the thousands of pages of material related to the case which Jeffrey MacDonald had accumulated over the years, and which he had agreed to make available to me in order that I might be better able to write my book.

  Among those personality disorders upon which considerable psychiatric attention has been focused in the past decade is a condition known as pathological narcissism.

  In his 1978 book, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch has identified some of the character traits associated with this disorder as being "pseudo self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor, a dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, and boundless repressed rage." Indeed, Lasch writes, the personality of the pathological narcissist consists "largely of defenses against this rage."

  Unable to "acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilty, or ... to mourn for lost love objects, because of the intensity of his rage," the pathological naricssist, "while sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, and often pan-sexual as
well," seeks to "avoid close involvements, which might release intense feelings of rage."

  Instead, he "attempts to compensate himself for his experience of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and impotence."

  Jeffrey MacDonald's condominium was quite comfortable, once I got used to all the mirrors.

  In the mornings, I would sit on the deck for a while, enjoying the sun. The Recovery Room bobbed gently at anchor, only a few feet away. MacDonald's friends were continuing the payments on the boat and on the Citroen-Maserati and on the condominium itself, so everything would be waiting for him when he returned. They all felt—because he told them repeatedly that it was certain—that this would be only a matter of months. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite its denial of bail, was sure either to dismiss the charges entirely on the same speedy-trial grounds it had invoked in 1975, or, at the very least, to order a new trial—so contaminated had the first one been by the malice and bias of Judge Dupree.

  I would spend hours each day with MacDonald's files. Going box by box, drawer by drawer, folder by folder, through every piece of paper I could find. He had, of course, the complete transcript of the Article 32 hearing, and, in addition, he had copies of the grand jury testimony of each of his family members, as well as of all those witnesses who were later called by the government to testify at trial. I would read slowly through these volumes, taking notes, becoming aware for the first time of an enormous amount of detail that had not been presented at trial.

  I found, for example, in the notes prepared at the request of his military attorney shortly after his interview with the CID on April 6, 1970, that MacDonald had written that on Monday, February 16—in addition to everything else he had done—he had "called a Maj. Sampson—he is a pediatrician at Womack. We. discussed moonlighting at Lumberton Hosp. and I asked to be put on the staff. He said I could begin working there shortly."

  Thus, in addition to having worked every night of January a Cape Fear Valley Hospital in Fayetteville, and having begun to work weekend shifts at Hamlet Hospital sixty miles away, Mac Donald had—on the last afternoon before the murders—sough yet a third moonlighting job. This seemed hardly consistent with his assertion that the months at Fort Bragg had been "a reattachment of our entire family because we were having the time and wasn't tired and I didn't have to rush off to work ..."

  In the same notes, he also had written: "One more thing— think I got a call from the coach of the Fort Bragg boxing team He had mentioned to me they needed a doctor to accompany the team for 30 days on a trip to Russia. I jumped at the chance, and offered myself. He called me on Monday, I think, to tell me the Dept. of the Army was trying to get me on orders for the trip and I would probably hear from him in the next several days Both Colette and I were very happy about this." This was consistent, perhaps, with his 1970 "diary" entry regarding the boxing trip, but hardly with what he had said under oath to Victor Woerheide: that "the first time that it ever clicked" tha there might have been a discussion regarding a boxing team trip to Russia had been in midsummer, during the Article 32 hearing.

  I also found it curious that later in these notes, while describing the attack by the four assailants, MacDonald had written—as he had told Dr. Sandoff in Philadelphia in April of 1970—"! suppose it's possible 'she' [the female intruder] was a male with long hair. CID never asked me if it was possible she was male."

  In late afternoon, I would drive to Terminal Island. I would sit with MacDonald for two or three hours each evening, in the visitors' lounge. Most nights, his mother was present. Occasionally, when her American Airlines schedule permitted, Sheree Sizelove would be there also. Often, friends and colleagues from St. Mary's came to call.

  MacDonald would talk about the horrors of his cross-country bus trip, of the evil personified by such figures as Dupree, Murtagh, and the Kassabs, of the failure of the jury selection process and of Bernie Segal's closing argument, of how—despite it all—he could not understand how the jury could not have at least found reasonable doubt. When the visit was over, I would stop and get a bite to eat. Then I would return to the condominium.

  He never came right out and asked me what I thought. And I never came right out and said. For him it must have seemed easier to assume that with me his innocence had never been in question. To ask directly would have been to risk getting an answer he did not want. For me, of course, it was easier to let him go right on believing whatever he cared to believe. At least it seemed so at the time. The more I learned the less easy any of it turned out to be.

  There was no dearth of enlightening material in the files. One folder marked "Book" contained a copy of a letter that Joseph Wambaugh had written to MacDonald on March 28, 1975, in response to an inquiry about whether Wambaugh might be interested in writing a book about the case. This was only two months after MacDonald had been indicted.

  You should understand that I would not think of writing your story. It would be my story. Just as The Onion Field was my story and In Cold Blood was Capote's story. We both had the living persons sign legal releases which authorized us to interpret, portray and characterize them as we saw fit, trusting us implicitly to be honest and faithful to the truth as we saw it, not as they saw it.

  With this release you can readily see that you would have no recourse at law if you didn't like my portrayal of you. Let's face another ugly possibility: what if I, after spending months of research and interviewing dozens of people and listening to hours of court trials, did not believe you innocent?

  I suspect that you may want a writer who would tell your story and indeed your version may very well be the truth as I would see it. But you'd have no guarantee, not with me. You'd have absolutely no editorial prerogative. You would not even see the book until publication. ...

  The next day, MacDonald had sent a brief note to Bernie Segal, along with a copy of Wambaugh's letter.

  Enclosed is very interesting. What do you think? He sounds awfully arrogant to me but it will be an obvious best seller if he writes the book. Please get back to me ASAP.

  Wambaugh, of course, had not written the book, though his discussions with MacDonald and Bernie Segal had continued into the summer of 1979. Now, I was writing it. As would have been the case with Wambaugh, MacDonald had absolutely no editorial prerogative. And the "ugly possibility" to which Wambaugh had referred had now become a reality.

  I found in the files a program from an athletic event: the Long Beach Heart Association's Second Annual Benefit Basketball

  Classic, April 11, 1975, played at the Long Beach City College Gymnasium.

  The "classic" consisted of a game between a team composed of Los Angeles Rams football players and one which consisted of emergency room physicians and technicians from various Long Beach hospitals.

  At guard, number 7, age thirty-one, height five feet, ten and a half inches, weight 185 pounds, was Jeffrey R. MacDonald, M.D. Beneath his name and picture in the program was a caption which he had written himself: "The Second Coming of 'Dr. J'—watch his hands!"

  This had appeared just three and a half months after MacDonald had been indicted on charges of having murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters with his hands.

  An extensive study of the narcissistic personality disorder has been madefy psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, who published many of his findings in a 1975 volume entitled Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.

  "On the surface," Kernberg writes, pathologically narcissistic individuals "may not present seriously disturbed behavior; some of them may function socially very well." Many possess "the capacity for active, consistent work in some area which permits them partially to fulfill their ambition of greatness and of obtaining admiration and approval from other people."

  Kernberg has observed "a curious apparent contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need for tribute from others. When narcissistic personalities are in a position of objective importance they love to surround themselves with admirers
in whom they are interested as long as the admiration is new. They obtain very little enjoyment from life other than from the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandoise fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard."

  Kernberg considers the main characteristics of narcissistic personalities to be "grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a remarkable absence of interest and empathy for others in spite of the fact that they are so very eager to obtain admiration and approval. ... It is as if they feel they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings, and, behind a surface which very often is charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness. These patients not only lack emotional depth, but fail to understand complex emotion in other people."

  Kernberg has noted that "the pathological narcissist experiences other people as basically dishonest and unreliable. The greatest fear of these patients is to be dependent on anybody else, because to depend means to hate, envy, and expose themselves to the danger of being exploited, mistreated, and frustrated."